ArchiMate ® 3.0.1 – in 3 minutes - developed by The Open Group ArchiMate Forum, the ArchiMate ® 3.0 Specification was first published in June 2016.

The basics

The ArchiMate Specification is a modeling language that enables Enterprise Architects to describe, analyze and visualize relationships among architecture domains using easy to understand visuals representations. It provides a common language for describing how various parts of the enterprise are constructed and how they operate, including business processes, organizational structures, information flows, IT systems, and technical and physical infrastructures. In a time when many enterprises are undergoing rapid change, ArchiMate models help stakeholders design, assess and communicate those changes within and between architecture domains, as well as examine the potential consequences and impact of decisions throughout an organization.

Target audience

Enterprise architects, business architects, IT architects, application architects, data architects, software architects, systems architects, solutions architects, infrastructure architects, process architects, domain architects, product managers, operational managers, senior managers, project leaders, and anyone committed to work within the reference framework defined by an Enterprise Architecture.

Summary ArchiMate 3.0.1

Developed by The Open Group ArchiMate Forum, the ArchiMate ® 3.0 Specification was first published in June 2016. A set of corrections was published in August 2017, and incorporated into the specification as a minor update to become the ArchiMate 3.0.1 Specification. New features included in the major update include elements for modeling the enterprise at a strategic level, such as capability, resource, and outcome. It also includes support to model the physical world of materials and equipment. Furthermore, the consistency and structure of the language have been improved, definitions have been aligned with other standards, and its usability has been enhanced in various other ways.

This version of the language has been created to respond to a number of requirements.

Increasing demand for relating business strategy with business and IT operations.
Technology innovations that mix IT and the physical world.
Usage in new domains, e.g. manufacturing, logistics.
Improved consistency and comprehensibility.
Improved alignment between Open Group standards, notably with the TOGAF framework.

The contents of the standard include the following:
Chapter Description
Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter includes the objectives, overview, conformance requirements, normative references, and terminology.
Chapter 2: Definitions This chapter includes definitions of the general terms used in the document.
Chapter 3: Language Structure This chapter describes the structure of the ArchiMate modeling language, including the top-level structure, layering, the ArchiMate Core Framework, and the full Framework.
Chapter 4: Generic Metamodel This chapter describes the relationships in the language.
Chapter 5: Relationships This chapter covers the definition and usage of the business layer concept, together with examples.
Chapter 6: Motivation Elements This chapter describes the concepts for expressing the motivation for an architecture, together with examples.
Chapter 7: Strategy Elements This chapter provides elements for modeling the enterprise at a strategic level, together with examples.
Chapter 8: Business Layer This chapter covers the definition and usage of the Business Layer elements, together with examples.
Chapter 9: Application Layer This chapter covers the definition and usage of the Application Layer, together with examples.
Chapter 10: Technology Layer This chapter covers the definition and usage of the Technology Layer, together with examples.
Chapter 11: Physical Elements This chapter describes the language elements for modeling the physical world, together with examples.
Chapter 12: Cross-Layer Dependencies This chapter covers the relationships between different layers of the language.
Chapter 13: Implementation and Migration Elements This chapter describes the language elements for expressing the implementation and migration aspects of an architecture e.g., projects, programs, work packages, plateaus, and gaps.
Chapter 14: Stakeholders, Viewpoints, and Views This chapter describes the ArchiMate viewpoint mechanism. Chapter 15: Language Customization Mechanisms This chapter describes how to customize the ArchiMate language for specialized or domain-specific purposes.
Appendix A: Summary of the Language Notation This is an informative appendix summarizing the language notation.
Appendix B: Relationship Tables This is a normative appendix detailed required relationships between elements of the language.
Appendix C: Example Viewpoints This is an informative appendix presenting a set of Architecture Viewpoints.
Appendix D: Relationships to Other Standards This is an informative appendix describing the relationship of the language to the TOGAF Framework, BPMN, UML and BMM.
Appendix E: Changes from ArchiMate 2.1 to ArchiMate 3.0 This is an informative appendix outlining the changes between Version 2.1 and Version 3.0. For details of the minor changes between 3.0 and 3.0.1 readers are referred to Open Group Document U172 .

Scope

The role of the ArchiMate Specification is to provide a graphical language for the representation of Enterprise Architectures over time (i.e., including strategic, transformation, and migration planning), as well as the motivation and rationale for the architecture. The ArchiMate modeling language provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures, and offers an integrated approach to describe and visualize the different architecture domains together with their underlying relations and dependencies.

The design of the ArchiMate language started from a set of relatively generic concepts (objects and relations), which have been specialized for application at the different architectural layers of an Enterprise Architecture. The most important design restriction on the ArchiMate language is that it has been explicitly designed to be as compact as possible, yet still usable for most Enterprise Architecture modeling tasks. In the interest of simplicity of learning and use, the language has been limited to the concepts that suffice for modeling the proverbial 80% of practical cases.